Monthly Archives: February 2010

College students have long been known to protest against war, racism and other social maladies. But now students at Santa Clara University are taking aim at what they see as a new form of injustice: allegedly poor cell phone reception.

Gingerly, some business travelers are venturing back into private aircraft after the battered economy — and a public outcry against that perk of fat cats, the corporate jet — walloped the general aviation industry starting in 2008.

I love watching people who enjoy publicly subsidized medical care and prescription drug benefits stand on street corners with signs warning of a socialist takeover of health care.

Given how long it took the Tea Partiers to realize their first name choice, ‘Tea Baggers’, actually described a sexual practice, there is probably little hope they will grasp how ironic they are. These individuals are the number one enemies of health care reform. The baby boomers. They’re retired (or about to be), they’ve got steady income and a great health plan. They’ve got theirs and you’re not going to mess with it.Continue reading →

We are at, arguably, the zenith of the human experience. On every front of art or science, both practical and theoretical knowledge built on thousands of years of human observation has accumulated into massive amounts of information stored electronically, magnetically or optically. Unlike the ancients who preserved their most valuable observations in stone, stable for thousands of years, or in books, which last hundreds, our information is stored in technology such as hard disk drives, compact disks or magnetic tape with typical lives of around 10, 15 and twenty years. In the event of a breakdown in society or technology, this information would be lost to future generations. The Rosetta Project is an attempt to develop storage that will last thousands of years while being compact.

Our first prototype of a very long-term archive is The Rosetta Disk – a three inch diameter nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. Since each page is an image, rather than a digital encoding of 1’s and 0’s, it can be read by the human eye using 500 power optical magnification. The disk rests in a sphere made of stainless steel and glass which allows the disk exposure to the atmosphere, but protects it from casual impact and abrasion. With minimal care, it could easily last and be legible for thousands of years.

..the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence.

Users with good FICO scores might soon start seeing ads for more expensive luxury goods and services than those with lower scores, as Google has started to experiment with targeting ads based on users’ credit score.